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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2012 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Elections, Politics.
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Scalzi’s piece is rhetorically clever but essentially a straw-man argument, or maybe it should be called a straw-hominem argument. Naturally, he imputes bad motives to the guy he claims to be arguing against.

There ought to be a cautionary term to identify people who write engagingly but who make bombastic yet fallacious or logically weak arguments. How about Sullivanite?

I’d never heard of him so I used Google to see what you were referring to. It is a nasty column. Mourdock said nothing about the rape victim. He said too much but it was all about the fetus.

Akin was stupider but “legitimate rape” meant, to me, forcible rape as opposed to statutory.

The left is desperate to get abortion into the election. I’m pro-choice but think these examples are of nasty politicians, not religion. Akin was dumb, Mourdock was foolish to be honest in a profession that is rarely honest and usually ill advised to be so.

I don’t know a lot about the guy, but I’ve been inclined to vote for him and intending to do some research on him, because of all the big glossy smear pieces I’ve been getting in the mail. They come pretty much everyday… here’s the one that came this morning…

Dark red to light orange gradient background, guy in a suit — presumably Mourdock, set against this background looking like the devil with flames behind him, he is clearly a dark evil man. He glares with his arms crossed at the only colorful part of the page — a multi ethnic group of school children caressing a globe, being cut in half by giant scissors…

The text isn’t much better, and on the whole encourages me to vote for this guy at a gut level… So much for the gut level, time to find out what his positions really are…

Mourdock was the fellow who went all the way to the Supremes to block the bailouts because union debts were jumped ahead of bondholders. He managed two funds that were affected. He has my vote. He sells himself as a straight shooter, somebody who is not going to bend just because it was politically convenient. He certainly demonstrated it with his abortion commentary.

PenGun – Whatever did you hear about Richard Mourdock that paints him as a flip flopper?

Reading the news it seems to me that when a woman gets raped and pregnant that liberals want to kill the wrong person. If death is the penalty, then they should kill the rapist. Killing the baby is wrongly punishing the child for the sins of the father.

Sending a rapist to prison is like sending him to heaven. He will spend the best part of his life raping fellow inmates.

The thing is that a pregnancy resulting from a rape is a horrible, traumatic situation, all the way around, for which there is no very satisfactory resolution, no matter how it comes down; brutalize a woman who has already been brutalized once already, or essentially kill an innocent proto-human being. Mr. Mourdock was attempting to articulate something of this – and Scalzi just leaped into constructing a disgusting straw edifice and began blasting away.

Let’s say that you are in a bad situation due to no fault of your own. What you do about the situation defines your morality. Should you choose murder as part of your solution? Be careful, because this would apply to more than just abortion. Anyone who feels wronged could grasp at this straw.

Grey Eagle – As I think on it more, I view it as a sort of weird bill of attainder. We may not be able to punish the rapist reliably but boy can we get the kid every time.

Even Scalzi admits that the large majority of women who are raped and pregnant do not kill their unborn. He declines to try to get inside their heads though. Why is their voice unworthy of an article? Why not the child’s point of view?